Three NVIDIA Fermi-based chipsets on launch?
updated 03:45 pm EDT, Fri October 2, 2009
NVIDIA Fermi to start with three models
NVIDIA's Fermi architecture will start with three models if it ships before the end of the year as promised, one leak from Friday claims. A flagship single-chip model would have the 512 cores NVIDIA is advertising, but a second model would, like the GeForce GTX 295, have two slightly less powerful chipsets on one card that combined would be much faster. The slowdown may be necessary as Fudzilla believes the card would have a peak thermal power of 300W.
Rounding out the line would be a slightly lower end, single chip model that would take the place of cards like the GTX 275 and would represent NVIDIA's most important model in terms of sales. Mid-range and budget cards aren't expected until 2010, and notebook chipsets may not show until much later into the same year.
Fermi is NVIDIA's first major architectural overhaul since the GeForce 8 series and should be much faster, especially for OpenCL and other tasks that depend on general purpose computing rather than just graphics.
